Making Everyday Mobility
A qualitative study of family mobility in Copenhagen Wind, Simon
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Publication date:
2014
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Wind, S. (2014). Making Everyday Mobility: A qualitative study of family mobility in Copenhagen.
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MAKING EVERYDAY MOBILITY
PHD THESIS BY SIMON WIND AALBORG UNIVERSITY
A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF FAMILY MOBILITY IN COPENHAGEN
YDA Y MOBILITY
SIMON WINDBY
DISSERTATION SUBMITTED 11TH OF JULY 2014
Aalborg Univversity
Assistant PhD supervisor: Associate Prof. Claus Lassen,
Aalborg University
PhD committee: Associate Prof. Lea Louise Holst Laursen,
Aalborg University
Senior Lecturer Eric Laurier,
University of Edinburgh
Chief Research Sociologist Randi Hjorthol,
Norwegian Centre for Transport Research
List of published papers: (papers can be found in the appendix, Folder E)
Jensen, O.B., Sheller, M. and Wind, S. (2014) 'Together and Apart: Affective Ambiences and Negotiation in Families’ Everyday Life and Mobility'. Mobilities [ahead of print], 1-20 Wind, S., Jensen, O.B., Kaplan, S. and Prato, C.G. (2012) 'Paving the road from transport models to “new mobilities” models'. paper in proceedings from conference 'Trafikdage'.
held August 2012 at Aalborg University. Aalborg: Aalborg University
This thesis has been submitted for assessment in partial fulfillment of the PhD degree. The thesis is based on the submitted or published scientific papers which are listed above. Parts of the papers are used directly or indirectly in the extended summary of the thesis. As part of the assessment, co-author statements have been made available to the assessment committee and are also available at the Faculty. The thesis is not in its present form acceptable for open publication but only in limited and closed circulation as copyright may not be ensured.
© Copyright 2014 by Simon Wind, Aalborg University Department of Architecture, Design & Media Technology Urban Design Research Group
Centre of Mobilities and Urban Studies (C-MUS) Aalborg University
Printed in Denmark by akprint, Aalborg
This PhD thesis concerns the everyday mobility of 11 families with children living in the Greater Copenhagen Area. The study is empirically based on a series of qualitative family interviews and GPS tracking, complemented by field studies of everyday family mobility. The main focus of this qualitative study is to explore how everyday mobility is associated with the family’s processes of coping with busy everyday family life. The PhD thesis is part of the project Analysis of activity-based travel chains and sustainable mobility (ACTUM), hosted by the Department of Transport at the Technical University of Denmark, in a strategic research alliance with the Department of Architecture, Design & Media Technology at Aalborg University.
People in contemporary Danish society, and in particular families with children, lead busy lives. Experiences of feeling harried, time squeezed and stressed are becoming increasingly a normal part of everyday family life. Family life is characterised by balancing complex schedules of geographically dispersed activities and tending to the social and emotional needs and wishes of the family by carving out time for quality family time and togetherness. This study’s primary research aim is to produce knowledge and understanding of the role mobility plays in coping with practical, social and emotional conditions of everyday family life. Secondarily, the thesis aims to discuss how such qualitative knowledge of everyday family mobility can contribute to the ACTUM project and provide decision support for transport policy making.
Through the analysis of the 11 families and their everyday mobility, the thesis elucidates the how the family members through their mundane quotidian mobility performances, such as commuting to work, escorting children to the kindergarten, going on the weekly visit to the grandparents, driving children to after-school activities, etc., are not only instrumentally moving family members around, efficiently and safely getting them from A to B, but also transforming travel time into small pockets of togetherness, experiences, care, play, relaxation, reading, work, planning and coordination. Furthermore, the thesis addresses the extensive labour, mobility skills and practical knowledge used by the family members in crafting and sustaining their usages of everyday family mobility. Consequently, the thesis offers understanding of the family’s everyday mobility through a toolbox consisting of a theoretical model, the elasticity model, and a theoretical vocabulary of instrumentel movement, mobile care, mobile togetherness, mobile in-betweens and mobile atmospheres.
Denne ph.d. afhandling handler om 11 børnefamiliers hverdagsmobilitet i Storkøbenhavn. Studiet er empirisk funderet på kvalitative familieinterviews og GPS tracking samt feltstudier af familiens hverdagsmobilitet. Hovedfokus i dette kvalitative studie er at undersøge sammenhængen mellem hverdagsmobilitet og families mestring af den ofte travle hverdag som børnefamilie. Afhandlingen er en del af forskningsprojektet Analysis of activity-based travel chains and sustainable mobility (ACTUM). Dette projekt er administreret og afviklet af DTU Transport ved det Danske Tekniske Universitet i samarbejde med Institut for Arkitektur &
Medieteknologi ved Aalborg Universitet.
I vor tids samfund lever folk, særlig børnefamilier, travle liv. Oplevelsen af at have travlt, være tidspresset og føle sig stresset er en stadig stigende men normal del af børnefamiliens hverdagsliv. Hverdagslivet er karakteriseret ved kompleks dagligdagsplanlægning af geografisk spredte aktiviteter samtidig med at der skal tages hensyn til familiemedlemmernes sociale og emotionelle behov for og ønsker om kvalitetstid og samvær. Afhandlingens primære mål er at producere viden om og forståelse af den rolle som hverdagsmobiliteten spiller i mestring af praktisk, sociale og emotionelle forhold i børnefamiliens hverdagsliv. Derudover er målet at diskutere hvordan sådan kvalitative viden om børnefamiliens hverdagsmobilitet kan bidrage til ACTUM projektet samt virke som beslutningsstøtte for politiske beslutninger indenfor transportområdet.
Gennem analysen af de 11 børnefamilier og deres hverdagsmobilitet belyser afhandlingen hvordan familiemedlemmerne gennem deres mobilitetsarbejde ikke kun handler om instrumental flytning af familiemedlemmer sikkert og effektivt fra A til B, men også handler om det at være sammen, have fælles oplevelser, drage omsorg, slappe af, oplade mentalt og bruge kroppen fysisk. Derfor tager dagligdagens familiemobilitet som pendling til arbejde, eskortering af børn til institutioner, togturen til det ugentlige besøg hos bedsteforældre, kørsel til fritidsaktiviteter, form som en aktiviteter i sig selv, som har både praktisk, sociale og emotionelle betydning og konsekvenser for familiemedlemmerne og deres hverdag. Derudover adresserer afhandlingen det store og ofte upåagtede mobilitetsarbejde, de mobilitetsfærdigheder og den praktisk mobilitetsviden som familiens medlemmer bruger i skabelsen og vedligeholdelsen af hverdagens mobilitet. Afhandlingen bygger og tilbyder forståelse af families hverdagsmobilitet gennem et teoretisk værktøjssæt bestående af en teoretisk model, elasticitetsmodellen, samt et tilhørende vokabular af instrumental bevægelse, mobil omsorg, mobil samvær, mobil mellemrum og mobil atmosfære.
Preface ix PART I
Chapter 1: Introduction
1-1: Everyday Family Mobility in Copenhagen 3
1-2: Studying Family Mobility and Coping Processes in Everyday Life 7
1-3: Research Questions 10
1-4: Road Map to the Thesis 11
Chapter 2: Theory of Science
2-1: Introduction 15
2-2: Pragmatism and Studying Everyday Mobility 16
2-3: Epistemological Considerations 17
2-4: Methodological Considerations 23
2-5: Conclusion 27
Chapter 3: Research Design
3-1: Introduction 29
3-2: Constructing a Research Design 30
3-3: Sampling Strategy 37
3-4: Qualitative Family Interviews 38
3-5: Mobile Field Studies 43
3-6: Analysis Strategy 46
3-7: Validity of Knowledge and Ethical Representations 52
3-8: Conclusion 54
Chapter 4: Theoretical Framework
4-1: Introduction 55
4-2: Everyday Life 56
4-3: Change in Everyday Life 59
4-4: Taskscapes of Everyday Life 62
4-5: Family 65
4-6: Relationality in Everyday Family Life 67
4-7: Coping Strategies in Everyday Family Life 72
4-8: Mobilities 74
4-9: Mobility Practices 76
4-10: Conclusion 83
Chapter 5: The Analytical Model of Elasticity
5-1: Introduction 85
5-2: Proposing a Model for the Production of Elasticity 86
6-1: Introduction 95
6-2: The Eleven Families 96
6-3: Urban Structure and Transport 108
6-4: Family Life 113
6-5: Conclusion 119
Chapter 7: (De)Assembling Family Mobility Practices
7-1: Introduction 121
7-2: Moving Together 122
7-3: Mobile Care 129
7-4: Mobile Togetherness 135
7-5: Moving with Materialities 141
7-6: Mobile In-betweens 149
7-7: Mobile Atmospheres 157
7-8: Conclusion 164
Chapter 8: Performing Everyday Family Mobility
8-1: Introduction 165
8-2: Pre-Travel Planning and Coordination 166
8-3: Setting Out 174
8-4: Disruptions and Skilful Mobility Performance 179 8-5: Weaving Transport Systems, Traffic Flows and Time 186
8-6: The Skill of Mobile Coordination 193
8-7: Conclusion 204
PART III
Chapter 9: Conclusion
9-1: Introduction 209
9-2: Revisiting Research Questions 209
9-2: Summary of Findings 210
Chapter 10: Discussion and Future Research Areas
10-1: Introduction 219
10-2: The Study of Transport 219
10-3: Bringing Transport and Mobilities into Dialogue 222 10-4: Informing Policy through Mobilities Research 225
10-4: Harriedness and Stress in Everyday Life 227
10-5: Further Research Areas 233
Figure 1: Three theoretical themes of mobility 7
Figure 2: Structure of the thesis 12
Figure 3: Pragmatist process of inquiry 24
Figure 4: Forms of inference 26
Figure 5: Audit trail 36
Figure 6: GPS tracking visualisation example 41
Figure 7: Mental map example 42
Figure 8: Timeline mapping example 42
Figure 9: Photo of setup 45
Figure 10: Formal model of code-to-theory in qualitative inquiry 47
Figure 11: Coding—categorisation example 50
Figure 12: Iterative-cyclical analysis process 51
Figure 13: Theoretical toolbox 84
Figure 14: Conceptual model of the production of elasticity 88 Figure 15: The two analytical perspective of the elasticity production 89 Figure 16: Location of the 11 families' residence 96 Figure 17-18: Neighbourhood of the Lindborg family 97 Figure 19-20: Neighbourhood of the Petersen family 98
Figure 21-22: Neighbourhood of the Bach family 99
Figure 23-24: Neighbourhood of the Møller family 100 Figure 25-26: Neighbourhood of the Jensen family 101 Figure 27-28: Neighbourhood of the Sørensen family 102 Figure 29-30: Neighbourhood of the Vangsgaard family 103 Figure 31-32: Neighbourhood of the Hartmann family 104 Figure 33-34: Neighbourhood of the Halkær family 105 Figure 35-36: Neighbourhood of the Nielsen family 106 Figure 37-38: Neighbourhood of the Lindborg family 107 Figure 39: Road network in the Greater Copenhagen Area 108 Figure 40: Orignal frontpage of the Finger Plan report from 1947 109 Figure 41: Public transport system in Copenhagen 110
Figure 42: Super bike path network 112
Figure 43: Biking in inner Copenhagen 124
Figure 44: Jensen parents morning commute 130
Figure 45: Christania bike 133
Figure 46: Mobile togetherness 138
Figure 47: Scene from Mikkel's work-home commute 150
Figure 48: Killing time in the Metro 154
Figure 49: Riding along the Lakes in inner Copenhagen 158
Figure 50: Elasticity-coping model 205
Table 1: Table of empirical data used in the study 36
Table 2: Sample variables 37
Table 3: Basic characteristics of respondents 95
Table 4: Modal split, national average versus Copenhagen 111 Table 5: Part time, full time and more than full time 114 Table 6: Commuting time, location of residence and modal choice 115 Table 7: Minutes used per day on primary childcare 116
Doing a PhD study resembles an everyday journey. You move from one place to another. However, this study has taught me that, although the destination is crucial (in terms of turning the thesis in on time), what goes on during the journey is the most important. This journey has taught me a great deal about the craft of conducting research, and it has opened a new world of exciting theory and ways of thinking about and exploring the world. Concurrently with this PhD study, I have also been on a personal journey that has been intertwined with my studies. Just prior to beginning the study in early 2011, my first son Aron was born, and in the summer of 2013, my second son Anton was born. In addition to prolonging my PhD for some months because of paternity leave, these changes in my family life have had a tremendous impact on my research. Becoming a family of small children and two working parents during the course of this research has been a great motivator and inspiration for my study of the lives and mobility of the 11 participant families in Copenhagen. My personal life has undoubtedly contributed to the decisions I made in terms of focus and direction of the study. It has also coloured my interpretation and understanding of everyday family mobility. Foremost, it has sparked my curiosity and interest in how families (besides my own) cope with the many practical, social and emotional conditions that populate everyday life as a family.
On this journey many people have greatly assisted me and without their help this PhD study would not have been possible. Firstly, I want to thank my main supervisor Ole B. Jensen and my co-supervisor Claus Lassen for all their advice and comments, and for the effort they have put into guiding me on this journey. Being part of the ACTUM project has provided a great backdrop for this study. I want to thank the people at WP1, especially Henrik Harder and Kristian Reinau, for exceptional collaboration and technical assistance with GPS tracking and GIS. I want to thank the ACTUM team at the Technical University of Denmark, Christian Hansen Overgaard, Sigal Kaplan, Carlo Prato, Goran Vuk and all the others who have participated in the ACTUM workshops. The ACTUM project also provided the opportunity to bring Mimi Sheller into the project. I want to thank Mimi for all the comments and valuable insights and for making the stay at the Centre at Drexel University possible. I particularly want to thank Philip Vannini, who conducted a fantastic PhD workshop at Aalborg University on how to perform and convey research; Mette Jensen for support and guidance in the beginning of my study; Aslak Kjærulff for the insightful discussions in Montreal and Philadelphia and my sister Laura Wind for helping out with translation and transcription.
My colleagues at the Urban Design Research Group and at C-MUS have made this journey all the more easy and enjoyable. Thank you for your support and comments.
I especially want to thank Ditte Bendix Lanng (not only for being a great travel companion), Mette Olesen, Maria Vestergaard, Anne Juel, Anne-Marie Sandvig Knudsen, Ida Lange, Jacob Bjerre Mikkelsen, Tina Vestermann Olesen, Cathrine Borg, Cecilie Breinholm, Jakob Sabra, Sal Hamid for all the thought-provoking discussions on theory (and yes, I have come to the conclusion that the world is relational) and method. In terms of my personal journey, I want to thank Eva, my girlfriend and the mother of our two boys, Aron and Anton, the most. Although there can only be one name on a PhD thesis, the help and support you have given me bears testimony that doing a PhD is still a relational accomplishment. Without you and all the hard work you have put into helping and supporting me along the way, through giving me time for reading and writing, this PhD study would surely not have succeeded.
Simon Wind Aalborg, June 2014
1-1: EVERYDAY FAMILY MOBILITY IN COPENHAGEN This PhD study is concerned with the role that the mundane mobility such as commuting to work, escorting children to after-school activities, travelling to visit grandparents, biking to the grocery store play in everyday family life. In the thesis it is argued that making and performing everyday family mobility is an active coping process adjusted accordingly to the practical conditions of getting from one place to another while dealing with travel time, contingencies and disruptions in everyday life and the social and emotional conditions of spending together, providing care and fostering intimacy, and thereby enacting a sense of family and familial community.
Hence it is argued that family mobility practices produce certain stabilising effects, in the thesis termed elasticity, that contribute to coping with practical, social and emotional conditions in the successful accomplishment of everyday family life.
This PhD study on everyday family mobility is part of a work package under the project ACTUM, “Analysis of activity-based travel chains and sustainable mobility”, administrated by the Danish Technical University in a strategic collaboration with Aalborg University and funded by the Danish Strategic Research Council1. The primary objective of the ACTUM project is to develop a prototype transportation model for the metropolitan area of Denmark. However, the work package within the ACTUM project hosting this PhD study has been specifically tasked with inquiring into the qualitative dimensions of everyday mobility. For this PhD study a specific, in-depth focus on the dual-earner family and its everyday mobility has been chosen.
The family, understood as any number of adults with one or more children living under the same roof, comprise only approximately 25% of all households in Denmark, yet almost half of the Danish population lives in these family households2 (DS 2014a).
In addition to its statistical prevalence, the family and its everyday mobility also represents a particularly interesting case because everyday life in the family is often strongly shaped by a series of conditional circumstances such as the intertwinement and alignment of family members’ busy activity schedules, individual needs and wishes, varying mobility capacities, and work and social obligations. Consequently, the family juggles everyday life by devising complex coping strategies (Lassen and Jensen 2004, Jarvis 1999, 2005). Because of this, the family can be understood as a
1 The project is funded by the Danish Strategic Research Council (project no. 10-094597).
2 It should be noted Statistics Denmark, the central authority on Danish statistics, counts as many as 37 different types of family constellations. However, the type of family that is in focus in this study is the traditional nuclear family comprising of two adults and one or more children living under same roof.
worst-case scenario in terms of complexity that serves as an ideal subject for studying how everyday family mobility is made and performed. Although there are studies of family mobility (see i.e. Hjorthol, Hovland Jakobsen and Ling (2006), Fotel (2007), Schwanen (2008), Holdsworth (2013)), the family as a mobility unit is an under- studied phenomenon that deserves more attention.
One way of approaching the significance of everyday family mobility is by considering the social context, the family’s everyday life, in which it is situated. Everyday family life is characterised by a multitude of daily activities, encompassing work, day care, kindergarten, school, after-school activities, leisure activities, shopping, social activities and familial activities, housekeeping, childcare etc. Although family members typically live under the same roof, many everyday activities are both temporally and spatially dispersed and de-centralised from the residence (on average, Danes travel 39.4 km per day, see TU (2014)). Consequently the number of daily activities, their length and geographical dispersion often manifest in the family’s everyday life as time pressure and even, in some cases, as stress. This “harriedness”
(Southerton 2003, Hjorthol, Hovland Jakobsen and Ling 2006) in everyday family life is exacerbated by the fact that most parents most Danish parents, whether male or female, are employed, and that their average work time is slightly higher than that of adults in households without children (Arbejdslivskommissionen 2007: 35).
Successfully accomplishing everyday life in the family is therefore tied to coping with time pressure and juggling the relationality and complexity and the temporal and spatial dispersion of family members’ activity schedules. Consequently, families manage to hold everything together by configuring and organising their everyday lives as complex interwoven and interlocking taskscapes (Ingold 2000: 194-200) held together and maintained through continuous planning, negotiation and coordination efforts (see Jarvis (1999, 2005) for more on this).
In these everyday taskscapes, reflecting the family’s coping strategies, the family’s mobility plays a crucial and indispensable role as it instrumentally facilitates getting family members back and forth to their respective activities. Daily mobility takes up a substantial amount of time, as each individual in Denmark spends, on average, 53.1 minutes per day on transport, commuting to work and school, escorting younger children to day care and kindergarten, not to mention after-school activities and play dates, running errands and doing the grocery shopping, visiting friends and extended family, etc. (TU 2014). Much of this everyday mobility is performed in “mobile withs” (Jensen 2013: 81) in which family members form joint constellations travelling together. In fact, in families with three members or more, 76% of all daily excursions from home are fully or partially performed together, and, not surprisingly, the number of trips performed together increases with the number of family members, i.e. 23% of the four-person family has three or more daily escorting trips (Thorhauge, Vuk and Kaplan 2012: 13,15).
Hence a likely reading of these data is that juggling busy everyday family life often
results in complex and relationally interlocking configurations of mobility practices.
But how is this mobility actually done? How does it feel, and what are its social and emotional outcomes? And how is everyday family mobility made and performed in order to accommodate the conditions of everyday family life? These questions point to the author’s curiosity and fascination with the skilful and creative orchestration of mobility in a busy everyday family life and highlight the study’s research ambition of understanding how family mobility contributes to the creative coping processes of everyday life.
MORE THAN A TO B
Although statistics can provide a sense of the amount and magnitude of family’s mobility in everyday life, they often succeed in rendering only a rather one-dimensional conception of it. In order to initiate a qualitative and in-depth inquiry, everyday family mobility needs to be considered as more than the instrumental shuffling of bodies across space. The emerging academic field of mobilities studies (Hannam, Sheller and Urry 2006, Cresswell 2006, Urry 2007, Adey 2010, Jensen 2013, Sheller 2014) provides an approach to the study of mobility which is in particular attentive to the social and societal aspects of. Going beyond a reductionist reading is to acknowledge that mobility, moving around in everyday life, matters, or as Tim Cresswell argues, that mobility “is rarely just about getting from A to B” (2006: 9). In so doing, this approach invites a plurality of readings and meanings of everyday mobility.
Furthermore, this mobilities approach advocates for a relational conceptualisation of family mobility (see i.e. Holdsworth 2013). In everyday life, family members seldom stand still; they move back and forth, in and out, together and apart. However, they rarely do so without considering other family members (and significant others), paying attention to and caring about their needs and wishes and the welfare of the family.
This often entails family members moving together in mobile withs, as when escorting children to school, commuting to work together or going on holiday. Even family members’ individual mobility, such as doing the shopping or going for a run, is still affected by and shaped in relation to its social context. Hence, as a basic condition of everyday life, family members are intricately connected to each other through their mobility. Indeed, family mobility gains it meanings through this embeddedness in the social context of the family. Part of understanding this complexity is seeing family mobility as “multidirectional” (Holdsworth 2013: 33), as a social phenomenon with both “socio-petal” and “socio-fugal” (Jensen 2013) efficacy, at times gathering family members and engendering co-presence and at other times moving family members away from each other. Everyday mobility “underscores the everyday practices of relationships” (Holdsworth 2013: 30); it may sustain and reaffirm family life by
facilitating quality time3 and intimacy between family members, but it may also reduce opportunities for individual mobility and create challenges for family harmony. It may provoke frustrations and heated discussions, which sometimes may even lead to moving apart (Holdsworth 2013: 65). The mobilities perspective, importantly, allows us to grasp social and emotional meanings, such as the formation of care and togetherness in family life, as intertwining with the instrumental and practical meanings of everyday family mobility.
Unpacking the multiple meanings of everyday family mobility effectively means conceptualising mobility as an activity in its own right, not just insignificant, dead time between one point an another, pushing and pulling people together and apart, but an activity that facilitates meaningful and important social encounters and sensorial and emotional experiences (Watts 2008, Vannini 2012, Jensen 2012). The mobilities perspective highlights the embodied experiences of mobility. When travelling in everyday life, family members interact with the social and material environment in which mobility takes place (Jensen 2013). Although they often go unnoticed, in the performances of everyday mobility family members move in and through “affective atmospheres”, affording sensorial and emotional experiences, that affect, in particular, how mobility is felt and perceived and shape how travel time might be put to use (Bissell 2010). It is argued in this thesis that under the right circumstances, everyday mobility practices can transform everyday journeys into social encounters of family togetherness or recreational and productive mobile in-betweens (see chapter 7). Hence everyday mobility in the family does not only incite emotional reactions but often also involves what family scholar David Morgan (2011: 113) terms “emotional work” as family members, through the active making and performing of everyday mobility, manage their own and others’ emotions and thereby contribute to everyday emotional coping. Finally, regarding everyday mobility as an activity, at least in the original sense of the term, emphasises that everyday mobility is not something that simply happens but is a “state of being active” (Etymology Dictionary 2014). As Jensen notes,
“mobilities do not ‘just happen’ or simply ‘take place’”; instead, everyday family mobility is “carefully and meticulously designed, planned … acted out, performed and lived” (Jensen 2013: 4). Therefore, looking at everyday family mobility through a mobilities perspective also necessitates paying special attention to family members’
intensive and extensive labour associated with successfully preparing and performing everyday mobility as a collective accomplishment.
Analytically allowing for multiple readings of everyday family mobility, acknowledging it as a practical, social and emotional phenomenon, re-orientates it from a peripheral to a central position in the family’s everyday life. In fact family mobility should not be perceived as an activity apart from family life but an integral part of it, and therefore also as important to the active and continual formation of family or to “doing” family
3 It should be noted when the term "quality time" is used in this thesis, it denotes the time spent with family and/or significant others which they themselves find in some way important or special.
(Morgan 2011). From this position, everyday mobility is not just a consequence or outcome of family, as if it were a fixed category; instead family is continuously forged and sustained in and through everyday mobility (Holdsworth 2013: 3). This is not to say that family mobility is the only constituent in doing family, but it certainly plays an important role as a co-constituent. Consequently, everyday family mobility does not play a backstage role; through making and performing everyday mobility family members are both practically engaged in engendering physical movement to match complex taskscapes and in actively enacting family and reaffirming social and emotional relationships amongst family members. In doing so they are pursuing the good life in ways that make sense for themselves and their family. With this context, the principal hypothesis that will be argued throughout the thesis is that the active production of elasticity is a crucial co-constituent in coping with the practical, social and emotional conditions of everyday family life.
1-2: STUDYING EVERYDAY FAMILY MOBILITY AND COPING PROCESSES IN EVERYDAY LIFE
The main objective of this study is to produce knowledge that contributes to the understanding of everyday mobility in relation to coping in family life. To do this, the
Figure 1: Three theoretical themes of mobility, everyday life and family in the study Mobility
Everyday life Family
Everyday family mobility
family’s everyday mobility practices are positioned centre stage as the prime object of study. Without getting into a precise definition of what a mobility practice is, as this will be presented shortly (see section 4-9), it is sufficient to state at this point that a mobility practice in this thesis is understood as a relational configuration, a social assemblage and a tenuous accomplishment. In order to do this, as illustrated in figure 1, the study draws theoretical inspiration from mobilities theory, as mentioned above, as well as family theory and everyday life theory.
While family mobility is at the heart of this study, it should not be separated from the context, the everyday, in which it is performed. Although this mundane scope may seem boring, the ambition of this thesis is to, in the words of Philip Vannini, “make the ordinary exotic, and then to make the exotic seem common sense” (2012: 37).
Therefore, while it may be tempting to perceive the quotidian and family mobility as mindless and prosaic, the empirical material to be unfolded in this study suggests otherwise, namely that everyday family mobility is complex, imaginative, poetic, creative and dramatic, and therefore “eminently worthy of our attention” (Hastrup 2005: 147).
Although this thesis also draws inspiration from non-representational theory, its main theoretical anchor and point of departure is in what has been termed the “mobilities turn” or “new mobilities paradigm” (Urry 2000, Kaufmann 2002, Hannam, Sheller and Urry 2006, Sheller and Urry 2006, Cresswell 2006, Urry 2007, Adey 2010, Jensen 2013, Adey et al. 2014, Sheller 2014). This interdisciplinary analytical turn is presently taking place in the fields of sociology, human geography, communication studies, cultural studies, urban studies and tourism studies, amongst others. Social life and society are, in the mobilities turn, radically regarded as emerging in complex relational socio-material processes of (im)mobilities, encompassing what Peter Adey terms the “little mobilities” of materials flows and bodily movements on a micro and even nano scale as well as the “big mobilities” of complex systems moving people, things and data on the national and global scales (2010: 7-12). Between these two overarching strands of mobilities research, this thesis is primarily inclined towards the little mobilities, as the focus is on the family’s mobility, its meanings, the actual embodied performances of everyday mobility and the sensorial and emotional mobile experiences afforded in socio-material mobility practices. Nonetheless, in focusing on this, the study also calls attention to everyday family mobility as part of the socio- temporal ordering of family members and practices in everyday life, which includes technological and material preconditions ranging from mobile phones and electronic travel cards to bikes, busses and cars to the infrastructure and large-scale transport systems that underpin daily movement.
This focus on everyday family mobility also links to the third theoretical source, sociological family theory (Smart 2007, Morgan 2011, Holdsworth 2013), as family mobility is not only a way of accomplishing practicalities in everyday life but also a social and emotional (and gendered) space in which family and family life are
enacted and familial relationships can evolve. It would arguably be difficult to focus on everyday family mobility without considering its social context. Indeed, understanding family mobility as an isolated phenomenon would make little sense, as it is through the relational intersections of various forms of mobility with other everyday practices and the doing of family that meanings are ascribed to family mobility. Moreover, approaching everyday family mobility in a nuanced and holistic sense also means emphasising the material and physical context as part of the object of study. Thus an additional source of theoretical inspiration that deserves mention, though it plays only an implicit role in the study, is actor-network theory (Latour 2005, Blok and Jensen 2012). Recognising this not only foregrounds the physical and material dimension of everyday family mobility, but also accentuates how the physicality of everyday transportation infrastructures and technologies are powerful actants both shaped by and shaping everyday family mobility.
Finally, as emphasised earlier, everyday family mobility is conceived of as a relational entity. Importantly, Ben Anderson and Paul Harrison argue that it is not enough to
“simply assert that phenomena are ‘relationally constituted’ or invoke the form of the network”; instead it is necessary to elucidate and understand the “specificity and performative efficacy of particular relations and different relational configurations”
(2010: 15-6). Heeding this injunction, this thesis does not simply evokes the general idea of everyday family mobility as relationally constituted but directs its inquiries towards the specificities and performative efficacy of the particular relations and socio- material configurations of the family’s mobility practices.
In its empirical approach to this, the thesis is inspired by what has in the mobilities turn been termed “mobile methods” (Sheller and Urry 2006, Mobilities 6:2 2006, Urry 2007, Watts and Urry 2008, Fincham, McGuinness and Murrey 2010, D'Andrea, Ciolfi and Gray 2011, Büscher, Urry and Witchger 2011). The study relies on a methodological framework combining qualitative family interviews with supporting methods of GPS tracking, drawing mental maps and small-scale ethnographic mobile field studies.
Empirically, the study is based upon 11 purposively sampled families living in the Greater Copenhagen Area. The families were chosen in order to ensure significant variation on the variables of geographical distribution, size and constellation, ages of children, income and transport mode usage. Finally, qualitative coding and categorising were used to analyse the empirical material and develop the theoretical concepts that aid in knowledge production in this study (Saldaña 2009). (For a much more elaborate discussion and description of the notion of mobile methods, the sample, analysis strategy and the research design in the study see chapter 5.)
The research design of the thesis is epistemologically and methodologically underpinned by the philosophical position of pragmatism (Brinkmann 2006, Bacon 2012, Gimmler 2014). In pragmatism, theories, method and analytical approaches are regarded as heuristic and sensitising tools to be used in performing inquiry in research (Gimmler 2014). Hence the theoretical positioning and approaches used to craft the
object of study and the theories and methods used to engage with this object, briefly presented earlier in this chapter, are to be viewed as adequate tools for the task at hand.
This meta-theoretical pragmatist framework is complemented with hermeneutics (Højberg 2004, Kinsella 2006, Brinkmann 2012). By doing so, the study wishes to use hermeneutics as a tool for describing and reflecting upon the process of interpreting and understanding everyday family mobility.
Furthermore, in pragmatism knowledge and inquiry intertwine, as knowledge is not the propositional mirroring of a reality out there, but instead it is the local and situated product of the purposive act of inquiry (Bacon 2012: 53-4). Hence the thesis does not seek to uncover universal laws governing everyday family mobility or to find causal connection between mobility and coping; in fact, a pragmatist position doubts that such claims can entirely be made. Instead, the ambition of this study is to produce local and contextual knowledge about the multitude of meanings the 11 families in Copenhagen ascribe to their mobility and coping in everyday life.
Thereby the study aims to contribute to the growing body of mobilities literature and expand the understanding of multiplicity and complexity in everyday family mobility. Beyond adding to the general knowledge production of mobilities studies, the aspiration of this study is also to tentatively fold this qualitative knowledge of everyday family mobility into discussions of how qualitative and situated knowledge can be used in relation to and in combination with quantitative approaches to studies of transportation as well as informing policy decision support. Hence, the knowledge of everyday family mobility produced in the thesis is also discussed in relation to the notion of harriedness and the tendency towards stress in contemporary everyday family life.
1-3: RESEARCH QUESTIONS
Based on this introduction to the subject matter, the analytical approach and research ambition of the study are formulated in a series of research questions. The overall research question guiding the study is:
How are selected families in the Greater Copenhagen Area coping with practical, social and emotional conditions in everyday life through the making and performance of mobility practices?
Additionally, to further explicate the detailed focus of the overall research question, a series of sub-research questions are formulated:
(i) How can the family’s mobility practices and the coping processes in everyday life be theoretically conceptualised?
(ii) How can qualitative family interviewing, GPS tracking, mental map making and ethnographic field studies be used to gain insight into how family members make and perform everyday mobility, the meanings ascribe to mobility and the sensorial and emotional experiences it affords?
Finally, the thesis also wishes to discuss the knowledge produced in this study beyond the scope of the above mentioned research questions:
(iii) How can qualitative knowledge of everyday family mobility contribute to quantitative approaches to and knowledge of everyday family mobility as produced in academic fields such as transport geography and transport and traffic planning, as well as provide insights for policy decision support in the areas of harriedness and stress as a tendency in contemporary everyday family life?
This final sub-research question will be addressed in the final chapter 10 after the conclusion.
1-4: ROAD MAP TO THE THESIS
The remainder of the thesis is structured in nine chapters divided into three overall parts. Part one presents the thesis’ philosophical positioning in theory of science, the research design, the theoretical framework and analytical model. This part specifically deals with sub-research questions (i) and (ii). Part two presents the 11 families in the sample and the context of Copenhagen before turning to the analysis of the families’
everyday mobility. This part specifically deals with main research questions. Finally, part three concludes the study and discusses the knowledge produced in the thesis in relation to quantitative approaches in transport research and policy decision support as well as harriedness and stress as a trend in everyday family life. This part specifically deals with sub-research question (iii).
As illustrated in figure 2, the overall intention with the structure of the thesis is to guide the reader from the abstract philosophical positioning assumed in thesis towards the more concrete aspects of the study’s research design, theoretical framework and proposed analytical model. With this organisation, the wish is to the decrease in level of abstraction as the thesis progresses towards the analysis of the empirical material the study.
Hence, the nine remaining chapters of the thesis are structured as follows: Chapter 2 introduces the study’s philosophical anchor in the positions of pragmatism and
hermeneutics. With these epistemological and methodological underpinnings, chapter 3 addresses the research design of the study. With inspiration from mobile methods, the chapter argues for and presents a mixed-method setup based on qualitative interviewing and ethnographic field study for data collection. With strong ties to the abduction methodological approach presented in chapter 2, this chapter argues for an analysis strategy based upon a pragmatic-interpretive qualitative approach through the methods of coding and categorisation. Chapter 4 introduces the three theoretical themes of everyday life, family and mobility. Drawing on non-representational theory and family theory, the chapter argues for a processual and relational-material reading of everyday life and family. Moreover, with the use of mobilities theory, the chapter provides a detailed understanding to the concept of mobility practice. Based on this theoretical framework it is argued that family mobility plays an instrumental role in coping in everyday life. To analytically engage with this theoretical claim, chapter 5 proposes the model of elasticity. It is argued that this is a fruitful analytical model for engaging with the study of everyday family mobility, which serves as the structural platform for the analysis performed in chapters 7 and 8.
In chapter 6, the empirical material—the 11 families, the Greater Copenhagen Area and family life in Danish society—are presented to provide a sense of the contextual and
Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5
Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8
Chapter 9 Chapter 10
Theory of Science Research Design
Theory Model
Analysis
Conclusion Discussion PART I
PART II
PART III
Figure 2: Structure of the thesis
infrastructural reality in which families lead their everyday lives. From this, the thesis turns to the two densest chapters, 7 and 8, which contain the analysis of the family’s everyday mobility. Linking back to the analytical model of elasticity introduced in chapter 5, each of these chapters inquires into everyday family mobility from a specific analytical perspective. Thus chapter 7 approaches the family’s mobility practices as assemblages, heterogeneous configurations of subjects and objects. Through the empirical material and theory, it is shown that family members accommodate practical, social and emotional conditions in everyday life by configuring everyday mobility practices to facilitate the practical and safe transport of family members, mobile care, mobile togetherness, mobile in-betweens and mobile atmospheres in everyday life. It is through these configurations and the performative and stabilising effects of mobility practices that family members produce elasticity. Chapter 8 approaches the family’s mobility practices as performances. This perspective emphasises the immediacy of doing mobility, and it is argued in the chapter that family mobility and its associated performative effects need to be carefully and skilfully prepared, coordinated, sequenced and performed in intimate interplay with the socio-material environments in which mobility takes place in order to be successfully enacted. Hence the chapter illustrates the extensive and relational labour, skills and knowledge family members actively utilise in performing mobility to actualise and sustain the production of elasticity and ultimately coping in everyday life.
In chapter 9, the study is concluded by returning to the research questions and summarising the findings of the study. Taking its point of departure in the outcome of the analysis, chapter 10 engages in a discussion of how qualitative knowledge of everyday mobility (as produced in this study) is positioned in relation to quantitative knowledge of and approaches to transport studies, and how these might benefit each other in dialogue. Furthermore, chapter 10 returns to the notion of coping with time squeeze, stress and harriedness in everyday life as general conditions many Danish families experience in contemporary society. It is argued that the notion of high and low elasticity can be analytically helpful in elucidating and discussing when family mobility becomes hyper mobility, a burden, and when it is, in fact, an instrument for coping in everyday life. As an outcome of this discussion, seven tentative recommendations for action are proposed for future transport policy and planning.
Finally, the chapter ends by giving directions for additional research themes based on the knowledge and insights produced in the thesis.
2-1: INTRODUCTION
As noted in the introduction chapter, this thesis takes its point of departure in a qualitative stance relying first and foremost on pragmatism4, and is especially inspired by John Dewey’s instrumental pragmatism (Brinkmann 2006, Bacon 2012, Gimmler 2014), complemented by insights from Hans-Georg Gardamer’s philosophical hermeneutics (Højberg 2004, Kinsella 2006, Brinkmann 2012). This chapter will address the philosophical positioning of the thesis within the theory of science and put forward the meta-theoretical foundation of the study and its influence on the epistemological and methodological orientation.
The chapter begins by positioning the study in relation to pragmatism and hermeneutics and presents the implications of these philosophical positions as tools for studying everyday family mobility. From this point, drawing mainly on pragmatism, the chapter addresses the epistemological question of what knowledge is and how knowledge is produced. Pragmatism offers an alternative to conventional representationalist epistemology in which knowledge is always local and situated in social practices.
Knowledge is not something passively “given”, but is actively “taken” in an interactive relation with others and the world (Brinkmann 2012:39). Hence knowledge does not correspond to the world; knowledge is what enables us to act controlled and purposive in the world.
The pragmatist understanding of knowledge is complemented by a hermeneutic approach to the conditions of understanding. Hence, while pragmatism serves as an overall meta-theoretical framework for the study, hermeneutics is brought into this framework as an epistemological tool for conceptualising the process of interpretation and understanding used in producing knowledge of the families’ everyday mobility.
5 In hermeneutics, understanding and knowing emerge through the process of interpretation. Interpretation is inter-subjective, meaning it occurs in dialogue with others and the physical and material world. Consequently it is always performed from a certain point of view, shaped by pre-understandings and prejudices, and situated in a specific historical and cultural context. Hence, in hermeneutics (as well
4 It is recognised that pragmatism covers a wide range of thinkers going back to the late 19th century.
Hence it is not a unified philosophical position but has many positions within.
5 Hence, in this thesis hermeneutics is used for its epistemological insights and thereby equips the study with tools for reflecting upon and discussing how knowledge is produced. Therefore hermeneutics in this study serves a epistemological purpose rather than an ontological one.
as pragmatism), both the researcher and the object of study are firmly located in the process of understanding and knowing, and therefore both are actively engaged in co- producing meanings and knowledge.
From this epistemological basis the chapter turns to considering methodology. With inspiration from Dewey’s pragmatic inquiry and Charles Sander Peirce’s concept of abduction, a methodology for the production of knowledge through the cyclical- iterative process of inquiry is outlined. This methodology serves as a foundation for the research design of this thesis, which is presented in chapter 3.
2-2: PRAGMATISM AND STUDYING EVERYDAY MOBILITY Pragmatism has a special interest in everyday life. One of Dewey’s ambitions was to reconstruct philosophy in order to bring it closer to and make it more socially relevant to everyday life (Bacon 2012: 47). Dewey did not discriminate between the scientific endeavour of “developing knowledge of the world” and mundane everyday “acting in the world [which] were all part of the same process of learning and discovery through experience” (Healey 2009: 280). Hence, pragmatism is in no way estranged from the everyday and the social practices people engage in. This makes pragmatism, as Brinkmann states, “particularly interesting for everyday life researchers because it blurs any hard-and-fast distinctions between scientific knowing and human knowing in general” (2012: 38).
This thesis is concerned with the everyday mobile lives of families. The objective is to understand and produce knowledge of how families use mobility as a mode of coping in everyday life. Pragmatism provides an approach to the world and knowing that can be used to engage with the families and their mobility from an “agent point of view”
(Bacon 2012: 108), taking their situational practices in everyday life as the point of departure. Furthermore, pragmatism offers a pluralistic perspective on the world as it insists “on the validity of different ways of viewing and reporting the world as a function of our different contexts and purposes in dealing with it” (Barnes 2008: 1547).
Neither everyday life nor mobility exists as a single and complete whole; depending on the situation, they are understood and performed in multiple ways. By focusing on knowledge how, pragmatism rejects the search for universal and everlasting laws in favour of recognising and emphasising the local and practical knowledge that emerges from practical situations. Hence pragmatism supports qualitative inquiry into everyday mobility practices as particular and contextual situations in which tacit knowledge is used in coping with uncertainty and contingency in everyday life.
Moreover, pragmatism offers an interesting instrumentalist approach to research practice. As Louis Menand writes, “ideas are not ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered, but are tools—like forks and knives and microchips—that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves” (2002: ix, qouted in Brinkmann and
Tanggaard 2010: 243). This should be understood in the broadest possible sense: not only ideas/knowledge, but also theories, methods, models, concepts and analytical approaches are all thinking heuristics and sensitising tools supporting the inquiry at hand rather than transcendental Truths (Brinkmann 2012: 56).
Similar to pragmatism, hermeneutic thought is interested in interpretation and understanding as ways of knowing. Kinsella (2006) argues that due to their emphasis on understanding and interpretation, as opposed to explanation and verification, there is a profound linkage between qualitative inquiry and hermeneutic thought, although this often goes unnoticed. Historically, hermeneutics was used mainly as a methodology for finding what were regarded as the true meanings of ancient biblical texts (Kinsella 2006). However, in philosophical, also termed ontological, hermeneutics, hermeneutics is not a method for gaining true knowledge but rather a way of being in the world, in which human life is “conceived as an ongoing process of interpretation” (Brinkmann 2012: 40). Hans-Georg Gadamer, one of the main proponents of philosophical hermeneutics, argued that humans are interpreting beings.
In everyday life, we are continually, often subconsciously concerned with interpreting and thereby seeking to understand and make sense of the environments we traverse, the actions and statements of other people, the texts we read, the scenes and signs we see and so on. Both Dewey’s pragmatism and philosophical hermeneutics regard knowing and interpreting not merely as something researchers do, a scientific practice or methodological set of rules and procedures, but instead as a way of being, something all humans are engaged in when performing everyday life. Hence interpreting and understanding is not only a “methodological process or condition but also an essential feature of all knowledge and understanding, therefore every interpretation relies on other interpretations” (Kinsella 2006).
From this understanding, hermeneutic thought offers a conceptualisation of knowing in research as an iterative process of interpretation of a world that is already interpreted and imbued with meaning. This “double hermeneutic” highlights the process of knowing as a two-way relation, a reciprocal interaction between the subject and the object, in which both parties holds transformative efficacy (Højberg 2004: 320). Unlike pragmatism, philosophical hermeneutics does not provide any specific methodological schemes; rather it is concerned with the conditions of understanding and knowing.
Hence these insights from hermeneutic thought will be used in a pragmatic manner in the following sections, in combination with a pragmatist approach, as tools supporting reflection on the process of knowing and knowledge production.
2-3: EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Pragmatism argues for an anti-representational approach to understanding what knowledge is and how it can be obtained (Gimmler 2012). It rejects the representational ideal of obtaining propositional or corresponding knowledge that simply mirrors
phenomena in the world. Despite this stance, pragmatist epistemology takes its point of departure in the empiricist idea that reality is and can be experienced through our senses. However, Dewey was critical of what he called the “spectators theory of knowledge” (Bacon 2012: 50) of the British empiricists, who claimed that through phenomenal experience knowledge, as an accurate representation of the world, could be obtained. He argued that perceiving phenomenal experience as a neutral and pure perception of reality is erroneous. Instead, human experience of the world, and hence knowing, always involves primary reflection “influenced and prefigured by theory, traditions and habits” (Gimmler 2005: 17). Thus, knowledge is never universal or fixed, but always local, contextual and contingent. Through the use of hermeneutics, the consequences of the active knower will be further investigated shortly.
In addition to being a non-representationalist philosophical position, pragmatism is anti-foundational, as it holds that “knowledge has and requires no foundation” (Bacon 2012: viii) neither in a privileged metaphysical sphere nor in a transcending logic or structure in the world. As the quest for certainty and universal truths is abandoned and knowledge is understood as always being local and limited, and emerging in empirical situations of social practice, knowledge no longer requires absolute justifications (Gimmler 2012: 47). Hence pragmatist knowledge never amounts to Truth, in the conventional sense of the word, as knowing can never be endowed with complete certainty. Instead knowledge is empirical, grounded beliefs that are “robust and stable enough to rely upon but always open to revision, not least because they have to adapt themselves to other changes in the environment” (Bacon 2012: 49). Hence pragmatism does not reject the claim that knowledge is based upon other knowledge and indeed should be. “[K]nowledge is a web of beliefs”, but those beliefs are never “permanent, Cartesian, foundations”; instead knowledge and belief are always provisional, as they may be proven wrong in other or later instances (Bacon 2012: 54).
Turning away from a representationalist ideal also shifts the focus of the scientific enterprise from uncovering and representing universal facts or truths in propositional knowledge that, to producing local and contingent knowledge claims of knowledge how. As this thesis subscribes to this stance, its aim is not to uncover universal laws or causal connections governing everyday mobility in the family; rather it is interested in knowing how families are coping with specific contingent situations and conditions in everyday life through making and performing mobility practices. In a pragmatic approach (and a hermeneutic approach, as we shall see shortly), the family’s everyday mobility cannot be isolated from the social and historical contexts within which it is embedded. Family members’ doings in everyday life are not observable, causal processes that can be easily traced; rather they are incited by reasons, motives and beliefs, and therefore are only recognisable as meaningful when situated (Brinkmann 2012: 20-1). Hence the study’s research design (presented in chapter 3) emphasises how family members live their lives, their everyday practices (especially mobility practices) and how family members form meaningful practical, social and emotional relationships through these everyday practices.
KNOWLEDGE EMERGES FROM PRACTICE
In its rejection of representationalism, foundationalism and the Platonic lineage of epistemology that clearly separates object and subject and promotes the theoretical
“observation” of the object (Gimmler 2012: 48), pragmatism offers a radically different and non-contemplative epistemology in which “we are not spectators looking at the world from outside but rather agents operating within it” (Bacon 2012: 108).
Dewey holds that knowing is not a passive process of perception and representation, but rather knowledge emerges in “the engagement of the active subject with the world” (Gimmler 2005: 17). Thus to Dewey, “the act of knowing something is part of interacting” (Gimmler 2005: 18), and knowledge emerges from the human experience of the world in practices, not from theory. Thus in pragmatism, practice has primacy over theory. This also means that all knowledge is fragile, fallible, situated and bound
“to social practices and cannot be maintained within a privileged sphere of absolute certainty” (Gimmler 2005:18). Hence Dewey favours an understanding of knowledge that is interactive with the world and locally and empirically grounded in cultural, historical and social practices.
Therefore knowledge should not be understood as “fixed and complete in itself, in isolation from an act of inquiry” (Neubert 2001: 2); rather the understanding of knowledge Dewey tries to develop is a practical one that transcends the dualities of subject and object, theory and practice, relativism and absolutism (Thayer-Bacon 2002: 97). Although knowledge emerges in practice, or the act of inquiry, thinking is still crucial, as “knowledge comes neither by thinking about something abstractly nor by acting uncritically, but rather by integrating thinking and doing, by getting the mind to reflect on the act” (Gordon 2009: 49). Knowing is a process that begins with the act of inquiry in a particular situation, but is tested and evaluated through reflection before being folded back into the world, trying to control the situation (Jones 2008:
1605). Hence knowledge, as Richard Rorty writes, is not a “matter of getting reality right, but rather a matter of acquiring habits of actions for coping with reality” (Jones 2008: 1607).
NORMATIvITY AND CONDITIONS FOR KNOWING
Both pragmatism and hermeneutics place the researcher in an active role, by which subjectivity is brought into the research situation. Indeed, when engaging in qualitative inquiry, we do not do so with a “virginal mind, but always with ‘certain acquired habitual modes of understanding, with a certain store of previously evolved meanings (Dewey, 1910 p. 106)” (Brinkmann 2012: 39). Consequently, when experiencing and thinking in a situation, the researcher is already and unavoidably engaged in primary reflection, evaluating and judging the situation “from some particular, concrete and value-laden perspective” (Hildebrand 2008: 225) against the background of individual norms and an existing web of beliefs. In pragmatism normativity is a profound and
integral part of qualitative inquiry and knowledge production. Through experience, normativity infiltrates the process of inquiry (Gimmler 2005: 19). Having departed from a spectator’s theory of knowledge, the ideal in the pragmatist research process is not to produce objective knowledge in the conventional sense of the word. In the act of inquiry the researcher is actively experiencing the world, interacting with it and transforming the situation that is being studied (Bacon 2012: 52).
Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics provides further tools for reflecting on the researcher’s active role in the creative process of interpretation and understanding that is essential to knowledge production. In line with a pragmatist approach to knowledge, the ambition of hermeneutics is “not objective explanation or neutral description”;
rather the purpose of hermeneutics is “sympathetic engagement with the author of a text, utterance or action and the wider socio-cultural context within which these phenomena occur" (Gardiner 1999: 63). As already mentioned, knowing, engaging in interpretation and eventually understanding are in hermeneutics regarded as always located in a specific historical and cultural context (Højberg 2004: 321). Hence the knower is never situated in a god position, being able to see everything, but is always granted only a partial view, framed by what in hermeneutics is termed a horizon. This metaphor describes what the knower is able to understand as being within the horizon, and, conversely, what the knower is unable to understand as being beyond the horizon.
The horizon is shaped by pre-understandings and prejudices and constitutes how we see and understand phenomena, how we orient ourselves, act and respond to the world (Højberg 2004: 322-3). Pre-understandings are the web of beliefs and knowledge that precedes any knowing, whereas prejudices are the set of normative orientations and meanings that is brought into the process of understanding.
In this light, the researcher is never separate from the object of study, but rather is actively shaping and demarcating the object based upon a knowledge ambition and is intimately involved in the production of knowledge. Hence the object being studied is “considered through the historically and culturally situated lens of the researcher’s perception and experience” (Kinsella 2006). Thus the produced knowledge always depends on a web of prior experiences, the choice of theoretical approach, the academic field, personal meanings, knowledge, beliefs and so on. Therefore the researcher must, as Brinkman argues, “take her own biography (and prejudices) into account“ (2012:
43). As briefly outlined in the foreword of this thesis, during the course of this study I have come to form a family and had my first and second child. The subject of the study, everyday family mobility, is therefore something that plays a highly relevant and significant role in my personal life. Hence my pre-understandings and prejudices affect the inquiry process, as it is experienced and interpreted through the historical and social context of my biography, tacit knowledge, values and normative beliefs.
Therefore, to some degree, my experience and interpretation of the 11 families in the study and their everyday lives and mobility is unavoidably set against the backdrop of my personal life. The fact that I was raised in a middle-class nuclear family, on the outskirts of one of the larger provincial cities in Denmark, has certain implications for
the horizon from which I perceive and interpret the families’ everyday urban mobility situated in the Greater Copenhagen Area. Some of the families’ mobility choices, tactics and coping strategies are familiar to me, as I have personal experience with them from my own life, while others struck me, when I first encountered them, as strange and alien. As Hastrup argues, normativity and value are basic conditions of research and knowledge production that cannot and should not be avoided (Hastrup 1999: 130). However, through purposive reflection, “each has the ability (however imperfect) to acknowledge and compensate for the influence our perspective may exercise on our analysis” (Hildebrand 2008: 225). Disclosing pre-understandings and prejudices does not eliminate one’s standpoint; rather transparency qualifies the knowledge being produced (Brinkmann 2012: 42).
Returning briefly to Gadamer’s concept of horizon: our horizon is what enables us to make sense of experiences and encounters in everyday life. It is a frame that encapsulates the knower’s personal and unique way of understanding and engaging with the world, which is shaped by personal experiences, the communities in which the knower is invested and the historical and cultural contexts in which the knower lives (Højberg 2004: 234). Hence to understand how and why families make and perform mobility practices the way they do and the meanings they ascribe to their mobility, it is necessary to consider a fuller picture of their lives by addressing the historical, social and emotional contexts of their mobility, or what is in phenomenology termed the lifeworld.
Moreover, as we are constantly subjected to experiences and encounters in both everyday life and in research that may confound our understanding and prejudices, the horizon never coagulates. Instead the horizon is, as Gadamer writes, “continually in the process of being formed because we are continually having to test all our prejudices” (Gadamer 1996: 306, qouted in Kinsella 2006). This formation of the knower’s horizon is termed fusion of horizons. This process is the outcome of the on- flow of interpretations of objects, be they texts, practices, statements, people, places and so on, that happen more or less reflexively in everyday life as well as in the research process. The object of study, as Kinsella (2006) writes, “merges with the interpreter’s own questions in the dialectical play, which constitutes the fusion of horizons”. It is in this reciprocal process of interpretation that meaning and understanding emerge.
The knowledge produced in the fusion of horizons is forged in the relational encounter of the subject and object, and is therefore not one-way (i.e. only affected by the subject’s pre-understandings and prejudices); rather the encountered object also holds transformative efficacy (Højberg 2004: 324). Consequently, in such a dialogue the researcher’s prejudices are “brought into play by being put into risk” (Højberg 2004:
325). This means that when confronted with empirical material on everyday family mobility, for purposes of both production and analysis, the researcher’s own pre- understandings and prejudices are tested and changed, which enables the researcher’s horizon to move and expand. Indeed, what separates the knower in everyday life from the knower in performing research is conscious and purposive attempts to become
